There are two restaurants in San Francisco with the same name on the front, about a mile apart, and confusing them is the most reliable way to have a bad evening. The small original is a breakfast and lunch room on Polk Street with a queue outside and no bookings. The other one, on Divisadero, is considerably larger, runs from morning until nine at night, takes reservations, and is built around a completely different idea: you pick one thing that was cooked in a pan and then you pick three things that were not.
Two restaurants, one name, one mile apart — and only one of them will hold a table for you. Ask Karpo which room near you actually takes bookings tonight.
What a meat-and-three is
It is a Southern American format, most associated with Nashville, and it is a way of ordering rather than a dish. You choose a main — usually something fried, braised or roasted — and then you choose three side dishes to go with it.
The sides are the actual point. They are cooked in quantity through the day and held hot, and the range typically covers greens, beans, root vegetables, mashed potato, macaroni and whatever else the kitchen has going.
The format rewards ordering badly on purpose. Three starchy sides is a legitimate choice and nobody will stop you, but one green, one starch and one you have not tried is the order that shows you what the kitchen can do.
It also makes it one of the easier restaurants to eat in as a vegetarian, because the sides are largely independent of the meat and several of them stand up perfectly well as a plate of their own.
The two rooms, distinguished
The Polk Street original is small, opens at eight, does not take bookings for its busiest services, and closes early one day a week. Its reputation rests on stuffed beignets and a Creole breakfast menu.
The Divisadero room is bigger, runs from morning through to around nine in the evening every day of the week, and takes reservations. That combination — long hours, a proper dinner service and a bookable table — is the practical difference.
The menus overlap but are not the same, and a dish somebody raved about may only exist at one of them. Establishing which room a recommendation came from before you set out saves a genuinely annoying journey.
Why the reservations matter
San Francisco has an unusual density of good restaurants that refuse to take bookings, which is fine when you are two people with a free evening and miserable when you are six people with a train to catch.
A room that will hold a table for a group at a fixed time is a genuinely scarce resource here, and it is the main reason to choose this one over the original if you are organising anything involving other people.
It also opens up the early evening, which is the slot the no-booking rooms handle worst. A seven o'clock table on a Friday is a normal thing to arrange here and an unlikely one a mile east.
There is a further practical angle to the long hours that gets missed, which is the mid-afternoon. Most San Francisco kitchens shut between lunch and dinner, so between roughly three and five-thirty the city offers you a coffee shop or nothing. A room that runs continuously from morning to nine in the evening is quietly one of the more useful addresses in the west of the city, and a three o'clock plate of fried chicken and greens on a day that has run late is exactly the gap it fills. Almost nobody plans for that hour until they are stuck in it.
The Divisadero corridor
This stretch of Divisadero has become one of the more interesting eating and drinking corridors in the city over the last fifteen years, running through the western edge of the Western Addition toward Alamo Square.
Alamo Square itself is a short walk and is the park with the well-known row of painted Victorian houses along one side. It is worth the ten minutes and it is free.
The corridor is served by buses rather than the metro, which keeps it slightly off the standard visitor route. Parking is street parking and is easier here than in the north-eastern half of the city, though that is a low bar.
Ordering for the table
The efficient approach for a group is to order different mains and to deliberately avoid overlapping on sides, then treat the whole thing as shared. Twelve different sides across four people is how you actually learn this menu.
Cornbread is the addition worth making regardless of what else is on the table. It is a different thing from the sweet cake-like version sold in most places and it belongs with the braised vegetables.
Portions are Southern rather than Californian. Four people ordering four mains with three sides each will not finish, and the sensible group order is fewer mains and more sides than instinct suggests.
Iced tea is the drink the format assumes and it is worth ordering once even if it sounds unremarkable. Southern cooking is salty, fatty and heavily seasoned by design, and unsweetened iced tea is the thing that resets your palate between a forkful of braised greens and a piece of fried chicken in a way that a glass of wine does not. It is also cheap and endlessly refilled. The sweet version exists and is a genuinely different drink, closer to a dessert than a beverage, and ordering it by accident surprises people every time.
Practical notes
This is a different restaurant from the Polk Street original, about a mile away, with its own menu.
It takes reservations. The original does not book its busiest services.
Open from morning until around 9pm, seven days a week — including a proper dinner service.
Meat-and-three means one main plus three sides. The sides are the point, not the garnish.
One green, one starch and one unfamiliar side is the order that shows off the kitchen.
It works well for vegetarians — the sides stand alone as a plate.
Alamo Square, with the painted Victorian row, is a short walk and costs nothing.
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Ask Karpo first
Same name, two rooms, one of which will hold a table. Ask Karpo which restaurants near you take bookings tonight and which ones will make you stand on a pavement.
